


In The Rattle Of His Exoskeleton

by May



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, Dubious Consent, F/M, No troll boobs, No troll dicks, Paralysis, Xeno, Xenobiology, Xenolinguistics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-04
Updated: 2013-04-04
Packaged: 2017-12-07 12:03:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/748305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/pseuds/May
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Since his last moult, the plates of his exoskeleton are visibly thicker, and the soft layer of sebaceous flesh underneath is, itself, growing hard, rendering it progressively less and less in need of its protective layer of skin. She scores a line down between the ridges of his chest plates with one serrated claw, anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In The Rattle Of His Exoskeleton

**Author's Note:**

> Gratuitous xeno. Doesn't have any scientific basis or anything; it's just an amalgamation of stuff I wanted to imagine.

Since his last moult, the plates of his exoskeleton are visibly thicker, and the soft layer of sebaceous flesh underneath is, itself, growing hard, rendering it progressively less and less in need of its protective layer of skin. She scores a line down between the ridges of his chest plates with one serrated claw, anyway. It leaks the watery purple of his surface veins, and he buzzes and clicks in annoyance, calling into question, once again, the sanctity of the mothergrub's oviducts.

She sees the edges of his nook beginning to open, anyway, beneath the hard chitin of his bulge. Not much, but enough to catch the indigo of his membrane. His fronds are still motionless, but it's understandable for a troll of seven sweeps to be aroused by a score down what would be, at some point, covered by a fully grown exoskeleton. When they were first together, at six sweeps, they had dug their claws into each other's residual neotenous grub meat, more than anything else.

From the lower vocal folds, he growls that she has diminished her sensory boundaries on his behest, and gives a raspy whistle of a laugh. She hates the way his speech no longer cascades in tandem along his upper and lower larynges, his characteristic buzz no longer soft. It goes harshly between a clicking keen and a guttural slide. It plays havoc with her own hearing canals as it makes it hard to pick up on a clear intent. Because of this, it has, over time, become difficult for her to appropriately react to what he has said to her. The glands on the sides of her thorax and throat have produced too much toxin without the satisfaction of a tense grapple, either mental or physical. His garbled syllables wind around her pan, forcibly locking her into a circular instinctual pattern. At points like these, however, she can turn it back onto him.

He rarely bothers even trying to take a dominant stance when they pail, and this time is no different. For a troll, hormones spike around the apex of the evening and most, at the height of their cycle, pail at this point in order for one of the two parties to excrete as much combined material into the drone's bucket as possible. On the meteor, the troll cycle has been yanked this way and that by the lack of real time. For perigees into the journey, she'd woken with lymph crusted around the edges of her exoskeleton, her body unused to the lack of day and night and the lack of sopor slime. Gamzee, perhaps, had been doing worse, although he had seemed to enter a state of elusive sluggishness, sloughing off the dead layers of his plates at a quicker rate than seemed healthy. They are well adjusted to a lack of a timed cycle, now, though - at least she could say that.

Dave had let her touch the soft pored flesh that keeps his musculature wrapped around his endoskeletal core. It had been pliable under her claws, and she had felt the need to be unusually careful about not catching his lightly bristling pelt against their serrations. He'd jibbed, gently, in his strange, flat voice.

Gamzee had hissed along his full pallet. Humans stink, he'd said, and with a snide chirping giggle, he'd pointed out her lack of the same deposits of glandulous mammal-fat that Rose has. Whilst still staring at the plates of her developing exoskeleton, such as they had been, then. Her own chitin has grown thicker and stronger, since, and he hasn't stopped his unabashed ogling at the way that it has begun to chain together, hard and flat, over her torso. His fronds are beginning to curl outwards, and she can feel her own nook begin to separate.

There is a schism, of course, between what her instinct fluids are swimming towards and what her cerebral nodes know where she is better. At the moment, the sloshing of hormones takes too much hold for her to think of anything else.

She presses herself against him and lets her nook press against his, not quite hooking herself onto him, yet. He chirps, the small frills on his neck - vestigial gills commonly seen on landwelling purplebloods - fluttering, and he gives a half-hearted snap of his mandibles. The worst thing, at these points, are when it seems like he doesn't even care. A good kismesis would be clawing and writhing, by now. He almost displays his apathy like a more self-consciously vigorous troll would display their aggression. Pressed against him, though, she knows that his membranes are seeping and his fronds are beginning to slip against hers. Despite this, he gives another bite of those mandibles and she knows that she's somehow convinced that he works in layers. It wouldn't be so bad if that, in itself, was not an embarrassing thing to get caught up by, at least since it's him.

She places her hands on his hard, broadening shoulderplates for a moment, and watches his maw stretch in a grin and his thick-boned hands wander over the flat plates of her chest and down to where her own soft grub flesh still pokes through at the waist. He lets his claws run against it, and she gives, unwittingly, a full buzzing hiss. He doesn't break the surface, and this almost makes it much worse. His saw-toothed mouth widens, but she manages to smoothly reduce her frantic buzz to a rhythmic purr that circulates through her chest. She feels her fronds ache and threaten to twine hard enough with his that she could hook into him. She pulls away and he whines, high-pitched and shameless, his fronds reaching anxiously and slicking against her thorax.

She gives him a glimpse of her own needle-teeth, and tells him that he's pathetic. He gives that subjugglator blast from the cavern of his throat, and it comes in a shriek and his base way of establishing himself above all other landwelling trolls. She twitches her fingers against the swell of his shoulderplate and then raises them to dig firmly into a spot among the vestigial gills at his throat. He doesn't honk, this time, but instead freezes in place, his third eyelids flicking, rapidly. He does, however, begin to shake, his exoskeleton rattling as he buzzes and whines in his arousal and frustration.

She doesn't like to gloat - doing what needs to be done says what needs to be said - but it seems just that he knows, that he really knows, what she can do and he can't. With her other hand, she grabs his shivering face and he stares at her, half-focused, his eyelids still flickering. She hisses about the skills learned by the legislacerators, the lengths they took to bring down those criminals. That precise point on a troll's neck that would render him motionless. Difficult to reach on a troll with a fully grown exoskeleton, easier to reach when the nerves are still close to the surface. If he ever bothered to learn anything, then he might know these things. Being a lump of innately grossly overpowered troll can't save you from everything.

A gurgling growl bubbles up from inside him and he snaps his mandibles, this with as much fervour as he can manage, this time. He's still rattling when she releases his jaw, and she laughs, high and whistling, herself. His paralysis will last for a few moments longer but she doesn't really want to kill him. She pulls herself away and he continues shaking and buzzing in desperation, his nook opening further, still. She still wants to claw open his membranes so that he can feel the sting of her teal when she joins with him. It's an uncontrollable, alien lust, and she loathes him for it, on top of everything else. He makes her pan feel scrambled.

She reaches her hand inside him, brushes his slick internal walls, and his furious buzzing halts abruptly in a sickening coo. She could flick the edges of her claws and tear him open, but she doesn't. He's whining, again, and she knows, still, with the occasional rattle, that he still can't move. She brushes against his membranes agonisingly slowly until he's giving a low, grinding whimper.  
When he's dripping fluid and still shaking gently around her hand, she withdraws it to a light scree of a keen and pulls him to her. She meets him, thorax to thorax, and her fronds connect with his, again.

At this point, the barbs lining the edge of her nook spring out and slide into the sides of his. He shudders, his plates clicking and his chest vibrating with a stuttering growl. It doesn't hurt, she knows, but it's uncomfortable. His paralysis has released him, however, and he reaches forward, his fronds tangling aggressively with hers. His claws dig between her plates and make her bleed light teal. She would chirp angrily at him, but the feeling of her genetic glands expanding with fluid is too overwhelming. She's clamped onto him, tight. They buzz and click in chorus, and her glands grow almost painful deep inside her nook. She releases, then, and lets it drip into him.

His body goes slack after she's done so, and it's pretty clear that his own glands have released material, although this will stay inside the pouches just above his flanks. Fully grown, they wouldn't show, but as it is, she can see them swell. He is shivering, gently, his soft grub flesh pulsing in the aftermath, and those pouches begin as an opaque indigo, but as they become swollen, it becomes more and more possible to see her teal beneath their glistening pearlescent surfaces.

He gives a satiated bubble of a purr, and can hardly articulate a thing. If they were still met with the drones, he would carry the fluid inside him for four or five hours, give or take, and then he would excrete the matter into a bucket. As it is, she doesn't know what he does with the fluid, and she doesn't care. It's not really like there's anything constructive to do with it, and she'd rather not be the one to deal with rancid, unfertilized genetic material.

There had been a trend, she knows, where an older troll would take a young troll whose exoskeleton had not developed enough that the pouches were concealed as a concupiscent partner. After pailing, the older troll would take the younger troll to an event and parade them, their pouches swollen with the material of the older troll. It was a status symbol for both. The young troll would usually be a blueblood, since life-expectancy and eventual possible size dictated that highbloods took longer to fully grow, and lowbloods usually had full exoskeletons by the time they ascended. The older troll would generally be a higher ranking blueblood or a seadweller.

The young troll would usually be firmly below purple but, on occasion, a young indigoblood or seadweller who had fallen short of expectations would enter a relationship like that. Often, they were disgraced enough that it was the only way to stop themselves from being culled.

**Author's Note:**

> Also written for an animal play prompt.


End file.
